Who’s a vet?

(Long and numbery: There’s lots more after the jump)

Trivia. Of the defensemen most likely targeted for Bridgeport, Mark Wotton has the most NHL games played (43).

Who has the second-most?

It’s not that hard. No defenseman they signed this week has ever played an NHL game. Jamie Fraser and Dustin Kohn and Andrew MacDonald haven’t.

The answer is Jack Hillen. With two. In April.

This seemed curious to me. So I set to looking back. I didn’t check every game from last year, but I got a decent sample before I looked at the clock (like 90 minutes ago now, ugh) and said a naughty word.

And it turns out this isn’t that curious.

For some reason, I started out going backward, back to the All-Star break. That’s 34 games. And in 21 of those 34 games, Bridgeport’s opponent dressed a six-man defense corps in which the second-most-experienced defenseman had played three or fewer games in the NHL.

(click on…)


Now, this is skewed a bit, because Bridgeport played Wilkes-Barre/Scranton seven times in this stretch. The only mainstay WBS defenseman who had NHL experience coming into last season was Alain Nasreddine — a stat that may be all the more remarkable when you consider that may have been the best defense, top-to-bottom, that came through here last year. And the only other WBS defenseman who played against Bridgeport last year and played in the NHL was rookie Alex Goligoski (three games); Kris Letang didn’t play against BPT. None of the rest have any NHL games.

Even taking out WBS, that’s 14 out of 27 other games. It includes Albany on Feb. 15 (no NHL games at all) and again on Feb. 22 and 24 (just back were Casey Borer and Joey Mormina, who got to the show this year but hadn’t before). It includes those two games in Worcester; March 19 had Brennan Evans and his two NHL playoff games, with no other experience for anyone; two days later, Evans was joined by J.D. Forrest, who has no NHL experience but at least played almost 100 games in Finland. It includes Manchester on April 2, where Joe Piskula played five games in 2006-07 and no one else had any. There were a few games where Andrew Hutchinson was out for Hartford, leaving Thomas Pock (58) with the likes of David Liffiton (three) and Ivan Baranka (none before his one last year). A couple of Binghamton games; Matt Carkner’s one NHL game backed up Lawrence Nycholat’s 28-plus-three. Jay Leach — two before last year, two last year — played into it for two teams, with Norfolk on Feb. 20 (Matt Smaby played all 14 of his NHL games in ’07-08) and then two weeks later in Portland (he was the only other NHL vet in those two games beside Bruno St. Jacques (67) — that team included new BST Joe Callahan, who has none).

There were several more games where the second-most-experienced defenseman had something close to 10 NHL games.

But wait, he thought after cursing the clock. Teams’ rosters get all messed up in the late winter and early springtime. How about the other end, when teams are more likely to have the rosters they planned?

It’s more of the same. The season opened at Hartford; Darius Kasparaitis has 863 NHL games under his belt, but no other defenseman had more than Liffiton’s three. Norfolk for the home opener didn’t quite fit the criteria: Bryce Lampman had 10 NHL games, Leach had his two and Dan Jancevski had six. For two games later on in this stretch, just add Smaby, who I think had played a handful of his 14 by then. Wilkes-Barre, Goligoski hadn’t been to the show yet. And Binghamton had only Nycholat and Carkner.

And there were a few others throughout these samples where the defenseman with the second-most NHL games had only seven or nine or a small number like that.

Of the other opponents, Philly usually had a couple of “vets,” and sometimes even vets: whether Alex Picard and Denis Gauthier together early, or throw in Rory Fitzpatrick late. Hershey had Josef Boumedienne (47) for most games, with Jame Pollock (nine), Chris McAllister (301), Danny Syvret (26) at various times. Lowell was one that sometimes cut it close, really: Mark Fraser has seven NHL games and was frequently the No. 2 behind various guys who had tons of NHL experience. And then there’s Providence; Matt Lashoff had 12 NHL games before this year, Dwayne Zinger had seven, Jonathan Sigalet had one, and Matt Hunwick had none before playing 13 this year. Zinger didn’t play the first BST meeting, so that one would fit.

(There would be somewhere between nine and 14 games where this would be the case for Bridgeport last year, BTW. Spiller had 59 games coming in, Wotton had his 43, and Fata had three. Two of the 11 games Wotton missed are covered by Aaron Johnson’s two-game conditioning stint. And I didn’t look up if Spiller and Wotton missed the same game anywhere else. Sorry.)

So yeah, long story short: This isn’t all that uncommon. NHL experience can be helpful, but it isn’t all-important at this level. It’s probably not worth losing sleep over. Relatedly, I should be in bed.

Michael Fornabaio